Researchers from Melbourne, Australia, as part of a joint venture between the University of Melbourne and the Royal Melbourne hospital, have mapped immune responses from an Australian coronavirus (COVID-19) patient. They studied an otherwise healthy 40-year-old female who became infected with COVID-19 and was admitted to the hospital. The study is published in the journal, Nature Medicine.
Since COVID-19 is so widespread and manifests differently in different people, it’s important to understand the immune response to the virus, especially in mild cases. One of the authors of the paper, Dr. Oanh Nguyen, says, “We looked at the whole breadth of the immune response in this patient using the knowledge we have built over many years of looking at immune responses in patients hospitalized with influenza. Three days after the patient was admitted, we saw large populations of several immune cells, which are often a tell-tale sign of recovery during seasonal influenza infection, so we predicted that the patient would recover in three days, which is what happened.”
The researchers leveraged the Sentinel Travellers and Research Preparedness for Emerging Infectious Disease (SETREP-ID), which is a platform that allows doctors to take biological samples from travelers that are returning to Australia from abroad. Dr. Irani Thevarajan from the Royal Melbourne Hospital Infectious Diseases led the study. Dr. Thevarajan says, “When COVID-19 emerged, we already had ethics and protocols in place so we could rapidly start looking at the virus and immune system in great detail. Already established at several Melbourne hospitals, we now plan to roll out SETREP-ID as a national study.”
The researchers worked with the University of Melbourne Professor Katherine Kedzierska to examine and dissect the immune response in this patient, which could be crucial to finding a vaccine for COVID-19. Kedzierska says, “We showed that even though COVID-19 is caused by a new virus, in an otherwise healthy person, a robust immune response across different cell types was associated with clinical recovery, similar to what we see in influenza. This is an incredible step forward in understanding what drives the recovery of COVID-19. People can use our methods to understand the immune responses in larger COVID-19 cohorts, and also understand what's lacking in those who have fatal outcomes.”